These are the books I have relied upon, read, skimmed and referenced over the past many years. While most are obviously design/UX related, there are a number of worthwhile business, management and culture selections too. As I found when studying music, influences to your practice can come from anywhere, including business, culture, art, and literature.
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Design as Art
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What is a Designer
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Understanding Comics
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The Elements of Typographic Style
Invisible Cities
Mental Models
The Interface: IBM and the Transformation of Corporate Design
The Real World of Technology
A Pattern Language
How to Tell When You’re Tired
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Design, Form, and Chaos
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The Humane Interface
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The Inmates Are Running the Asylum
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Observing the User Experience
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The Ten Faces of Innovation
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The Future of Ideas
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Information Architecture for the World Wide Web
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Information Architecture: Blueprints for the Web
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The Social Life of Information
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Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences
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Envisioning Information
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Interface Culture
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The Design of Everyday Things
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Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things
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Things That Make Us Smart
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Prototyping: A Practitioner’s Guide
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Contextual Design: Defining Customer-Centered Systems
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The Elements of User Experience
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Making Things Happen: Mastering Project Management
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Usability Testing Essentials
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Search Patterns: Design for Discovery
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The Poetics of Space
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The War of Art
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Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things
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Sketching User Experiences
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Handbook of Usability Testing
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The New Typography
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Primer of Visual Literacy
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Metaphors We Live By
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Designing Interfaces
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Information Foraging Theory: Adaptive Interaction with Information
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Designing for Interaction
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Universal Principles of Design
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Basics of Qualitative Research
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Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience
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Hamlet on the Holodeck
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The Experience Economy
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Usability Engineering
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Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights
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The Persona Lifecycle: Keeping People in Mind Throughout Product Design
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The User Experience Team of One
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Creativity, Inc.
Designing Disney’s Theme Parks: The Architecture of Reassurance
Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation
Service Design: From Insight to Implementation
Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping
Designing for Emotion
Don’t Make Me Think, Revisited
Design is a Job
Rework
